Comment by DrewADesign

::sigh:: Windows is an AI slop hellhole, and MacOS is way more interested in being flashy than being good. It should be Linux's time to shine as a general-audience desktop OS... but the usability just isn't there.

As everyone points out when talking about Linux usability, it's fine for your grampa who just uses the email client and browser, but those users are switching to tablets, en masse, anyway. It's obviously fine for technically savvy users who are willing to deal with the periodic breakage or other hassle.

Importantly, It's just a bad experience for users who require hardware, software or something else that tablets don't facilitate, but aren't interested in looking through stack overflow posts and reddit threads to see why the 6 year old tutorial for getting their video editing software to work doesn't apply to the distro they just installed because they couldn't figure out how to install their video card drivers on the other distro. And why does that program they used to use to control their firewall not change anything anymore (which to them just looks like the firewall doesn't work, so they can never research their way out of the problem?) And how do I [insert the bazillion other problems that are non-issues for people with the background knowledge, but for everyone else, frustrating, time-wasting brick walls that probably cost them more in lost billable time than multiple copies of Windows 11 Pro.]

I've been using Linux since the 90s but I still don't use it for a lot of my media work. It's just too much of a PITA when I just need to satisfy my use case, which has nothing to do with the OS.

Even the commercial distros like RHEL are just, comparatively... janky. I really wish it was easier to integrate more interface design expertise into FOSS development. The workflows are just super different. This is why commercial products have product managers that can objectively balance and coordinate the efforts between design and development. I think we've gotten to a point where more of the FOSS crowd sees the benefit of competent expert UI designers, but making that practically useful is a tough nut to crack.